I hate quotes

As a natural part of becoming a well-rounded educated indiviual, established universities apparently feel that it is in their students' best interest to require courses such as philsophy and macroeconomics in order to gain an engineering degree. <sarcasm>This makes perfect sense to me</sarcasm>. But beside my opinion on academics, allow me to digress.

I was recently looking through the requirements for my term paper in my macroeconomics course and, in a nutshell, I must write a 5-page paper that critiques a quote (a list of which was provided) from the past and apply its meaning to the present. Reading the list of quotes and skim-thinking about how I would write a paper about them, I realized how completely ridiculous quotes are. It made me ask myself why people find such value in these silly things.

It always amuses me knowning some teenage girls literally spend hours every month on random sites across the net searching for that one perfect quote that sums up everything that she feels about her life at that very moment. But my question is... why doesn't she just say it herself? Quotes come from quotable people, those scholarly enough to have their words savored through time for others to enjoy, but who are these people to say anything about how you feel about your life and the people/world around you?

I hate quotes. I really do. I wish every one would stop reading quotes and spend more time thinking about the issues at hand; the ones that really matter in their life. Instead, they wallow away looking for that brilliant person who fit an entire life's story in one beautiful grammatical sentence. I would just like to ask the world to stop dwelling on quotes about how one should live his/her life, and spend more time trying to activily enjoy his/her own life.

Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to change my professor's mind about the value of quotes, so I'm now off to write my term paper...